Fear is a major part of every solo parent’s life, whether it’s rational fear or irrational fear. Many of us live with this low grade sense of fear a majority of the time. Unfortunately, that fear sometimes can be crippling or at least keep us from living fully. So how do we overcome being governed by fear and live fully into our true selves with a sense of courage?
Our guest is Jamie Winship. He has decades of experience bringing peaceful solutions to some of the world’s highest conflict areas. So this guy knows fear. He knows what it means to live fearless. He has a distinguished law enforcement career in the metro DC area, and he worked in high conflict areas in the Middle East for almost three decades. He has since worked with leaders in professional sports, business, education, government, nonprofit and other sectors, and now he and his wife Donna are co-founders of Identity Exchange, which helps individuals and teams discover new levels of creativity and resiliency within the framework of true identity. He’s the author of “Living Fearless.”
Elizabeth, what are you most afraid of in life right now?
I have an 11-year-old son, Jax, and I know that because of things that happened in my childhood, I have a very keen awareness of death. And I have random visualizations of losing my child to death or even nightmares. I am so afraid of losing him.
Jamie, in your story, you’ve been in all kinds of dangerous situations around the globe with your family. Tell us what you learned about fear to start this.
Fear is incredibly valuable. 99% of what we’re afraid of, we learn to be afraid of. We’re taught to be fearful of things because humans only have two innate fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. Those are the only two innate fears that we’re born with, all other fear is learned. It’s all learned, and it can be absolutely unlearned, but fear is a gift. The role of fear is like a warning light on an engine. The beauty of fear is it is pointing to something in your life that you believe or think or are going to do that’s going to hurt you. That’s what fear is for. It’s not for you to focus on the emotion of fear. It’s for you to focus on what it’s pointing to—something you believe, something you think about yourself or others, something you think about God that is going to hurt you. And the fear is asking you to address the lie that you believe. Once the lie is addressed, the fear is gone. You don’t have to pray that the fear goes away. What you want to pray is “What is it that I’m actually afraid of and what does it mean that I believe?”
Once you address that, the fear doesn’t have anything to point to. I’m afraid of heights, for example, and I’m walking towards the rim of the Grand Canyon at a certain distance. This thing goes off inside of me like, “Hey, whoa, where are you going?” And then I can say, “Dear God, take this fear away from me” and still keep going in that direction. The fear gets more intense the closer I get because the fear is saying “The direction that you’re walking in is harmful to you,” but we’re not taught this. And so it’s like, “The fear is my enemy.” No, the fear is your friend. Where you’re going is your enemy. And so as I walk closer and closer, the fear becomes debilitating. It’s trying to stop me from going in this direction or thinking in this direction, and so it can actually paralyze you. And so I don’t pray that the fear goes away or the Grand Canyon moves, I just turn around. Once I turn and look in the other direction, fear’s gone. The fear’s gone because I responded to what it was warning me about. And so once you learn this, when you go into situations and that fear alarm goes off, the question is, God, what is it that I’m afraid of? What is it that I’m really afraid of? What’s the fear of pointing to? And you’re afraid that God is not with you. That’s what you’re afraid of; you believe the lie that God is not with you. And if you hold on to the belief that God is not with you, that means this whole situation depends on you, and that’s terrifying because it’s not true, and the belief that it is all on you will destroy you. So the fear is very valuable. And so when I ask a person what they’re afraid of, what I’m going to end up at ultimately quite quickly is, “What do you really believe about God? That’s what the fear is saying, here’s what you believe about God. He’s not here to help you, and this is beyond him. It’s all on you. The fear is a warning. That belief will destroy every relationship you have and it’ll destroy you.
Once you know that, you deal with fear immediately, not because you’re trying to not be afraid but so you can get rid of the lies that the fear is pointing to. That’s the goal. That’s what Jesus is trying to explain. So if he says to the disciples, “Tell me what you’re afraid of,” and they said, “We’re afraid of storms at sea.” He says, “Get in the boat. We’re going into a storm.” They ask, “Why?” He says, “So I can show you. It’s not that you’re afraid of the storm, you’re afraid the storm is God, and you have no control of what happens there.” So when Jesus is asleep in the storm, he’s showing them, if you really understood what’s true, this is what you would be doing in a hurricane, you’d be resting. And they look at him and they go, “Wow, don’t you care that we’re going to die?” Both of those are not true. Their perception is you don’t care and we’re going to die. Both of those are false, and their fear is pointing to what you believe about Jesus, that he doesn’t care about you. You believe this storm is greater than God and it’s going to destroy you? And when he gets up, he addresses both of those lies and the storm stops.
What would you say is the difference between being fearless and being brave?
I think especially when you’re in a conflict zone, we would tell our people,”Look, don’t try to be brave. We don’t want brave people because brave is more of I‘m going to prove something to you. Or it’s a situation where you feel so trapped, there’s no alternative. I’ve got to go do this. I’ve got to go take out the machine gun nest because we’re all going to die. That’s an emotional I’m going to do it. Someone threw me into the thing, there’s nothing I can do. I’m going to try and survive it. Usually those kinds of acts produce trauma in the person. It’s not like, Wow, I really overcame that—it’s, I’m not doing that again unless someone throws me into it again. So that’s how I think of bravery. That idea of I’m going to be brave has cost us the lives of different people on our team who are trying to show that they were brave. So when you think about that, when a person is trying to prove that they’re brave, it’s because they’re afraid. Fear is driving that. I’m so afraid, I’m going to have to prove to everyone that I’m not afraid. That doesn’t prove anything. So to be fearless is the idea of courage. There’s bravery and there’s courage. And courage is the word “to encourage.” It’s about joy. Someone courageous is moving because of joy within them, even though the situation around them is quite dangerous. So a person who’s brave is like, I’m just going to storm the enemy and it causes trauma and unnecessary casualty. A courageous person is sitting in the conflict asking, God, what do you want me to know and what do you want me to do? And when God says, I want you to go forward, I want you to step into this. They’re threatening to kill you, but I want you to get in the car. You’re not getting in to prove you’re brave. You’re getting in the car because Jesus has invited you into it. And there’s a joy element to it, not joy like, “Yay.” “He went to the cross for the joy set before him. He endured the cross.” That’s courage. Not like I’m going to prove how strong and tough I am: I’m going to go do this. That’s not it. That’s bravado. What’s fear-producing is you believe something that’s not true about what’s going to happen: you’re going to die. That’s the biggest fear right there. This is going to kill you. That’s our big fear. Humans’ big fear is death at all levels. The death of rejection, some of the things you guys are dealing with, if you go through trauma, divorce, death, the fear of rejection is a kind of death. It’s the fear of I’m a failure. All those are the fear of death. All of those are the fear of actually dying. And what happens to you after you die? None of us even know, we don’t have the experience to verify; we can only hypothesize about it, which is never a good idea. God doesn’t live in the hypothetical. He only lives what’s true. And so to try and get God to answer your hypothetical fear, he’s like, I don’t deal in the false. I don’t live in that world. I live in what’s happening. I give you the grace for what’s happening right now in the present tense. The enemy lives in the hypothetical. The enemy lives in the realm where God isn’t, which is the hypothetical world. And our imagination can drift over into the hypothetical and it produces fear in us.
But the fear is not like, Whoa, what if something bad happens in the hypothetical? The fear is warning you: Stop living in the hypothetical. That’s what the fear is warning you against, not what happens in the hypothetical. It doesn’t matter what happens there. It’s not true. Jesus isn’t present in the hypothetical, so you’ll never find peace there. You will find peace in where Jesus is. Where is he? Right here in the present tense with you. So when you’re in a situation where Jesus is present with you and he’s saying, “These guys want to kill you. They’re inviting you to come with them and kill you.” And Jesus is there with you and he’s saying, “I’m inviting you. I’m going with you into this process. And let me tell you something about death, the reality of death. I took it away. It doesn’t exist. I destroyed death on the cross,” we don’t believe that at all. That’s what scares us. We believe the lie that “No, death isn’t conquered; it’s horrible. It’s the worst possible thing that could happen even though we have a Savior who went into it and came back out and said, ‘I just took that away forever. Don’t ever be afraid of that again.’” We don’t believe it. And our fear is always telling us, “You guys don’t believe this. Why don’t you believe it like that?” Courage is Jesus inviting me into something and I’m saying, “Well, yeah, but these guys could shoot me.” And he said, “I took death away from the one who had the power of death (Hebrews 2), and I liberated you from the burden of the fear of death. Why are you saying that lie? Why are you bringing that lie back up? Why are you digging up something that I took away forever?”
What I’m hearing is bravery is self-sufficiency: I’ve got to do something about that which typically ends in creating more chaos or more danger. And courage is more rest and surrender in the midst of what might be causing fear?
Courage maintains thinking in the present. Bravery is just like, “Here we go.” Courage is very thoughtful. And it’s like the movie “Hacksaw Ridge” if you’ve ever seen that where he’s a conscientious objector, but in the firefight and everyone’s getting killed, he keeps going back into the danger and coming back out and going back in. Every time he comes out, he could say that’s enough, but he’s asking God, “What do you want me to do?” And God’s like, “Let’s go back into the danger.” And he can go in and out of it, very calm, very thoughtfully because he’s listening to God. He’s paying attention to what God says about the situation rather than just what his emotion says about the situation.
How can it unify a group of people? Can you unpack that a little bit?
When you’re in a group of strangers and you don’t know anyone or what they believe about anything—you’re looking for what unites human beings immediately—what draws humans into common ground immediately, no matter their background, whether they’re Muslim or Christian or gay or straight. What unites them immediately? That’s what you’re looking for. What humanizes all of us? And so people think “Well, love does.” Well, no, because most people in the room don’t know what love is. They have never experienced love. So to say, “Let’s all get together around love,” no one knows what that means. So what’s the unifying factor? The one thing everyone in that room understands is fear. All of us understand fear. We’ve all been afraid. We all know, and most of us in the room are currently in fear at some level. And what’s interesting especially about Westerners is that we don’t know how to introduce something without separating the room. We don’t know how to start a conversation without dividing the room into groups because we are taught and trained to identify by groups. Jesus never identifies people by group. He won’t let them do it, especially in a room that’s in conflict. I’m going to do a major city council meeting in a public session. I’ll be walking them through inner healing because for the last year, none of them would talk to each other. So the city attorney calls me and goes, “Hey, I’ve heard you’ve done this before. What would it take to get you to come out here to our city and run the city council meeting? It has to be in public. Can you walk us through reconciliation? We can’t get anything done in our city.” And so I don’t even have to go. I can say, “Because everyone on your city council’s afraid. That’s why. And fear shuts down all creativity and all ability to reconcile.” So when I go into a room and I just look at the person, I say, “Here’s what I want you to say. I want you to say your name and I want you to tell me what you’re most afraid of currently in your life right now.” So it doesn’t even matter if they actually tell the truth. As long as they name a fear, everyone in the room will go, “Yeah, I know exactly how that feels.” So suddenly it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or conservative. We all feel that. And so I always start. And in one of the city councils that I’ve done in the past, they were at war with one another. And the new mayor of the city was like, “Can you bring this group together because we can’t function?” And so I went in there and I said, “Nobody introduce yourself. Here’s how we’re going to do it. Say your name and I want you to say what you’re most afraid of in your life right now. And I’ll start.” And I said, “My name’s Jamie. And my biggest fear right now is I’m going to be a huge disappointment to all of you. I’m terrified that I’m going to disappoint you in what I’m going to do. And that disappointment would make me never want to come in this room, but I am going to do it. But I want you to know I’m afraid of disappointing you.”
That makes everyone in the room drop their fists. All the walls go down. And then it’s weird, this kind of empathy happens. Some people are like, “Oh, well.” And then some people even go, “Oh no, we don’t think you’re going to.” They’ll immediately try to console me even though they don’t know who I am. And the next person was a civic leader and she said her name. And she goes, “I feel like I’m a failure to the group that put me on this council.” I just stopped her. Stop. Thank you very much. Next. And the police chief said, “I feel like I’m failing the city because of the chaos that’s in this city.” We went all the way around the room and the new mayor said, “I feel like I’m unworthy of the position of mayor.” And I said, “Okay, now let’s go back again. I want you to make an identity statement about who you believe you really are. You’re saying, ‘I am.’ What do you believe?” “I am a failure.” Thank you very much. We went all the way around the room. “I am unworthy.” I said, “Okay. Now here we have 15 people. One’s a disappointment, one’s unworthy, and the rest are failures. What are we going to resolve together? Nothing. Because failures and disappointment and unworthiness can never resolve. All you can do is self-protect and self promote.” So I said, “Let’s first get rid of that identity which was taught to you by someone. Let’s exchange it for who we really are, and then let’s talk about the problems of the city.” And it is very moving. People don’t know that’s how they’re operating. But then once they do that, what do I do with it? We’re going to give it away. But we can’t just give it away. We have to exchange it or we’ll take it right back. So we have to bring a new one in so the old won’t come back. I just walk them through that process and then the next 60 minutes is, “Okay, in your true self, let’s solve the problems of the city and humans can do it. Co-creators with God. That’s our identity with God. There’s nothing we can’t do.”
How does one unlearn fear? How do you backtrack that?
That’s a beautiful question. And this is the process of sanctification. That’s what this is. If any man’s in Christ, he’s the new creation, the old has passed away, the new has come. That’s a continuous process. I’ve been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me and the life I live in the flesh, I live by faith and the son of God who gave himself up for me. I was saying that to myself this morning because of stuff that I’m just so not adequate to do—arenas that God’s invited me to and I have no experience in. I have no expertise. But that’s what he loves because he wants you to see who you really are and you won’t do it because you’re afraid. So he pulls us into these situations and he walks you through them. And then when you come out of them and you’re like, “Oh my.” It’s like you look in the mirror and say, “I didn’t know you did that when you made me.” He goes, “Oh, there’s way more than that. But stay with me because you’ll settle right here. Keep going.” My wife led me through two hours of inner healing because of an incident from yesterday. I’ve been doing this for years in zillions of places. But it’s a real struggle all the time. The lies never stop. What happens is you just learn to identify them so quickly that they don’t have an impact, but they’re always there. They’re always swirling, right? When someone walked me through my own lie, he asked, “What are you most afraid of?” I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint somebody. That’s my big fear. And so the identity is I’m a disappointment. And so then he asked, “Who told you? Who taught you that you were a disappointment?” It’s the same question God asked Adam and Eve, “Who told you? I didn’t tell you to be ashamed of yourself.” But a lot of us think God is saying that to us because we were taught that He’s saying that to us. And so every time we’re with God, we have a sense of shame. That’s the worst lie you could ever believe. He became shame for you is the truth, not He came to make you feel ashamed of yourself, which is what most of us believe about God. So when we die, we’re terrified of what’s going to happen. He asked, “Where did you first learn that?” And it’s like your brain remembers everything that it’s been through, but we bury it. We have all these coping mechanisms to not think about that stuff. And so then it’s like, “Lord, search me and know me, reveal to me any way in me that’s offensive to you and lead me in the way everlasting.” So I’m not going to try and tell myself what it is; I’m asking the spirit of God to show me, remind me, reveal in me: Where did I learn this lie? I can’t even remember. And what’s offensive to God is you believe something about yourself that he never said. That offends him that you believe something about him that’s not true—and because it hurts you to believe those lies.
So I’m like, “When did I first start believing I’m a disappointment?” And you just kind of slowly say what you’re remembering. Just say it out loud. And it’s so simple because it’s like the Lord is walking you into a dark attic and he’s just holding your hand going, “Let’s go.” And he’ll go as far as you can handle. And then when it’s too much, he backs out and says, “We’ll do it again. We’ll go back tomorrow.” And you go a little further into the darkness until there’s no space unexplored. That’s what you want. The full you is exposed and the enemy doesn’t have a dark attic to come take you. I’m not afraid to go into any room in my life.
If the enemy wants a challenge, someone can say to me, “You’re a disappointment.” I’ll say, “Let’s go look in that room. Let’s go. Because when you get in that room, we’re going to find Jesus there.” And it actually encourages me when that lie is said to me. And so the enemy stops doing it. It doesn’t have any more effect. And so I’m thinking, “God, who’s the first person who told me I’m a disappointment?” And people know. They can remember. “When did you first feel that?” And I remember my mom started this little Bible study group for kids on our street, and I hated it. I just hated going. When I was in third grade, I was embarrassed by the whole thing and we had to knock on doors and invite kids. My brother loved it. He thought it was the most fun. I hated it. So right away I thought, “Wow, there must be something wrong with me.” And my mom’s my nurturer, so I’m going to my nurturer to tell the truth about something that troubles me. And I tell her, “I don’t want to go to the Bible study.” And she said, “Well, if you don’t want to go to the Bible study, that’s disappointing to God and to me.” I opened myself up to try and understand what was happening, and I got shamed for it. And so immediately I think, “Wow, I’m a disappointment to God and her if I don’t do this, but I don’t want to do this so I’m trapped.” There’s no way out of this trap. So I have to go do this thing and try and like it, but I don’t. But then that means I’m a disappointment. So the only thing you can do is figure out a coping mechanism to deal with it. And my coping mechanism was “I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving to people I’m not a disappointment.” And that’s what I started doing. I would excel in everything I did, all up through the police department into the State Department. I excelled at everything, but not in a healthy way. I got promoted and awarded, but I never could get away from “…but really you’re a disappointment.”
It prevented me from really going after the highest level of things because I realized, “Man, if I got up at that level, I’d be exposed.” And so I would self-destruct at certain levels to stay low enough, not to draw too much attention to myself. And so when I had that memory, I told my friend walking me through it. He said, “Here’s what we want to do. Your belief is that God wasn’t there somehow. Let’s ask God, ‘Where were you when I was trying to figure that stuff out? Where was Jesus? Where was love?’” I was 38 years old, trying to work, and had no idea how much it was affecting my life. But the CIA dude I was working with saw it immediately in me. And he kept telling me, “You don’t know who you are. Dude, you don’t know who you are. You believe something false about yourself because you’re not being who you are. You’re imitating other people. Imitating other people means you don’t know who you really are.” I said, “I feel like Jesus was with me—the spirit of God was with me.” And he said, “God, what do you want him to know about that day?” And I couldn’t believe this idea came to my mind. The Lord said to me, “I didn’t invite you to that Bible study. I never wanted you in that Bible study.” I was like, “God didn’t want me in a Bible study.” That’s impossible. That cannot be true. But if it is true, it’s the most liberating, beautiful thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Can I receive that from God? Because as far as I know, all God does is run Bible studies. And if you don’t want to go, you’re in trouble. And I started crying, “Is it possible I was right, that I didn’t belong in that group?” And the Lord said, “Yeah, I made you not want to be in those groups.” I was like, “Why?” He said, “To be in groups that would never come to a Bible study. I want you in that group. Your brother was made to be in this group. You were made to be in places in the world where nobody will come to a Bible study.” And I was so happy about that. And I looked at my life and everything I had done was to be among people that will never go to a Bible study group. Why? Because religion tries to form you into the patterns of what is acceptable. And I cried my eyes out once I understood that, vocationally, I no longer had to prove anything to anybody—just be who I was. When Muslim guys are like, “Get in our car, we’re going to kill you.” I’m like, “You’re my people.” And people are like, “Why do you live overseas? You’re really brave.” I’m like, “I’m not brave. You don’t understand. It’s where I was made to be.” If God told me, ‘You have to go live in Kingsport and go to Bible studies,’ that would be the hardest thing for me to do. But other people love that. He said to me, “I made you to love people in the dark.” That’s why I loved being a cop. I got paid to go into the darkest places with people in their darkest times and bring light to them. But in a church situation, I don’t know what to say. I have a hard time. So I was beginning to believe that something was wrong with me because I didn’t want to be in a Bible study. And the fear was trying to point me to the lie that I was believing. And so I tell people all the time that I’m working with, “Don’t try and like something that God made you hate.” He doesn’t want you to be comfortable over here. He won’t let you rest there. He made you to be at rest in Iraq or wherever. And so those people need to be there. My brother’s a lifelong Young Life staff dude. He lives in Bible studies and he loves it and he’s great at it. And I live in the dark world, and when we’re together, we just rejoice together in our identities in the places where God made for us to be.
How does discovering your true identity really create fearlessness?
The beautiful thing about the scriptures is that we read them like case studies through the history of people in different scenarios—men and women, different cultures, different times, basically going through the same process over and over starting with Adam and Eve all the way through Revelation. It’s people struggling with a wrong view of themselves and a wrong view of God, and therefore, a wrong view of other people. They’re living upside down to the Great Commandment: Love God, love your neighbor in the same way you love yourself. That means you have a right view of God, a right view of yourself, and a right view of your neighbor. If you have a wrong view of God, it produces fear in you because your view of God is wrong, it produces a wrong view of yourself, and definitely a wrong view of others. When Jesus talked to people, he said, “Tell me who you think you are. Tell me who you think I am. Those are both wrong.” He flips it and the change is so dramatic in the person that Jesus doesn’t have to sit him down and go, “Okay, now you got to go share your faith.” He doesn’t have to do that because the true identity won’t do that stuff. The false always will gravitate towards that.
When Jesus sees Zaccheus up in a tree, the word Zaccheus means “pure innocent one.” So when God looks at this person in the tree, he sees what he made: the pure innocent one. God can only see what he created. He doesn’t see lies. He sees what’s true. The truth is that the pure innocent one is in the tree. So the text introduces him: There was a man named Zaccheus who was a publican and a sinner and a rich man. Here’s one true identity and two false identities. And he’s living in the two false identities, and the whole population is affirming the false identities. So the false is just running the whole show. But he wants to see Jesus. It’s the emphasis on seeing each other. He wants to see Jesus, but he’s small in stature, which in the Arab world means a “scumbag.” When you say someone’s “small in stature,” it doesn’t mean they’re short. It means that they’re like a little slimy little person because they’re so corrupt. He’s afraid of the crowd. So he is up in the tree, and Jesus didn’t say, “Hey, public tax collector, rich man, come down here.” He doesn’t say that. He says, “Innocent pure one, come down here. I must abide with you today.” That’s the word he uses: abide, not visit you—abide with you today. Who? The innocent pure one. Zaccheus descended the tree with joy and received him. Jesus offered him a very deep, beautiful invitation into the true self, and he came down with joy to receive it. When he goes to his house, he’s not going with the tax collector. He’s going with the innocent pure one. And when he sits with them, the innocent pure one invites all of his tax collector friends in because that’s what the innocent pure one does. And he shares Jesus with everyone around him. And then he decides, “I’m also going to share my wealth that I took back out into the world.” Jesus didn’t ask him to do any of that stuff. Why is he doing it? Because Jesus is saying, “Why don’t you act like who you really are? Why don’t you just be who you really are? What would that look like?” It would look like inviting all his friends, giving back more. And Jesus is like, “Beautiful. That’s who I want to abide with.”
It’s the same with the Samaritan woman. She runs up in the town and gets all the men that have objectified her and brings them all to Jesus. Jesus didn’t tell her to get the men, but the real her did—the true identity. She’s a leader of men. She’s not the object of men. She’s a leader of men. And as soon as she realizes it, she goes and leads men. But she was going to live her whole life as a victim of men because she was upside down. Once you’re in the truth of who you are, it’s not that you’re braver; fear doesn’t have to keep warning you you’re off track all the time. The fear just drops because you go in that identity. And you do these incredibly courageous things because that’s who you are—not in every place, just the places where the identity wants to go.
[As Westerners] we get our identity from what we do, and what people think about us, and how people brand us, and we fit into these groups. I went to a men’s group meeting for the first time, and the leader said, “We’re in this group. We’re going to be authentic.” I don’t like when people say that in the beginning: We’re going to be authentic. What does that mean? And so the leader starts, so he says, “I’ve been divorced twice.” And I’m like, “Oh, no.” And he says, “I struggle with pornography.” So that’s his authentic introduction. Well, what’s the next guy going to say? The next guy goes, “Well, I drink too much.” The whole group goes around and introduces themselves in their false identities. It gets to me. I’m like, “Listen, first of all, I’m happy. I’m joyful—I’m sorry to disappoint the group.” And I said, “Can we do something? Would you just think like this? We’re going to go back around the room. Would you introduce yourself the way Jesus would introduce you and stop introducing yourself the way Satan would introduce you?” And they didn’t know how to do it. I said, “If Jesus was standing behind you and he was introducing you, would he say, “Well, this guy struggles with pornography”? Would he ever say that about you? Never. Because Jesus doesn’t accuse people of things. Let’s learn how to introduce ourselves the way Jesus would introduce us and live in that identity.
We have widows and widowers who walk through some pretty traumatic things with losing a spouse. We have a lot of traumatic situations where there was physical and/or sexual abuse—and I myself, have a sexual abuse in my past. And of course, God didn’t invite me into that, but where was God when that happened? I can’t make sense of that.
That’s been the question forever: If God’s good, why is this happening? Lots of people have been asking that question for a long, long time. All of us have had trauma in our lives because trauma’s relative to the person. You can’t say a person’s trauma is considered big or small; it’s devastating to them. The deeper you go into the dark places, the bigger the temptation to believe that God is not present, that God is absent. That’s really the fear. In every religious group and gender group and every level of person, in every human being, the deepest fear across the board is that they’re powerless and alone. That’s their deepest fear. They’re powerless and alone—that’s the world perspective. The American Christian perspective is, I’m stuck in a situation where everything depends on me and I can’t do it. For example, I ask dads all the time, “Are you a good Christian parent?” And almost all of them will say no. Then I ask, “What’s your definition of a Christian parent?” There is no definition for a Christian parent. Jesus didn’t give a definition for a Christian parent. We did. We came up with it, and then we set this standard and said, “If you’re a good Christian parent, you do this, this, and this.” It disqualifies everybody except the person who wrote the standard. And so you’re constantly dealing in shame. We’ve developed these measurement scales for everything and none of us make it. None of us are making it. So when you’re in a traumatic situation, that just emphasizes your absolute powerlessness and aloneness, and the temptation is to believe it therefore is true: I am powerless and I am alone based on this experience that’s real. You can’t just minimize it and go, “Well, whatever. All things work together for good” and all that nonsense. That’s a real experience. So the only way to understand that experience is to walk through the experience with Christ. It’s the only way to gain any sense of, “Were you with me in that situation? And if you were, what were you doing?” This is how we pray all the time: Where were you? What were you doing? Because here’s what I believe: I believe that you either didn’t care or didn’t have the power to intervene. Both are horrifying thoughts to me. If either one is true, I’m all on my own because the temptation is to believe that. So Jesus is our example.
In Hebrews 5, Jesus offered up special petitions for not only what he wanted, but what he needed—supplications with strong crying and tears. This is his level of distress. This is in the garden. He’s going to be killed. He knows it’s coming. His question is, “Am I going to be totally alone in this thing? The disciples are already gone. My friends have already abandoned me.” That’s not his question. This is what it says: “But with crying and tears, to him who was always able to save him out from death, the one that’s able to save him out from death is leading him into death. And he was heard because of his reverence towards God.” Jesus shrank from the horrors of separation from the bright presence of the Father. What is Jesus praying? “The one who can save me out of death is leading me into death.” And then “Abba, Father, is there another way to do this?” The only time Jesus refers to God as Abba is in the garden. That’s how desperate he was in his humanity. “Daddy, there’s got to be another way to accomplish what needs to be accomplished here than this, but not my will, your will be done.” And Hebrews says, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.” That’s our example.So the lie is to believe that the suffering of the trauma is somehow apart from God. The only way Jesus could understand what was happening was to go all the way into death itself. On the cross, when he quotes Psalm 22 and opens the section with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” the temptation is to believe that you have been forsaken by God. But if you’re Jewish and reading the Torah, you read the first line of a section and then you read that whole section. So when Jesus shouts out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he’s saying, “This is the part of the Torah that we need to quote right now.” And it ends with, “You have never forsaken me, not even in death.” That to believe that you are forsaken by God is not true, even into death. You are not forsaken—not when someone’s beating you or torturing you or doing horrible things to you. You are not forsaken. And this person’s brokenness, being acted out on you, does not take anything away from you or give you any kind of identity. You can get identity from it, but if you do, it’s because you believe the lie.
In my own life, it’s like, “Jesus, where were you when this was happening? Because my feeling and my deep belief, deep down belief is like you were nowhere and you didn’t care. Tell me the truth. Where were you?” And only God can meet a person in that place. No human can explain it. But I’m telling you, if he doesn’t meet you there, if he doesn’t meet me there, then I don’t have anywhere else to go. I’ll just figure out how to cope with it. But he meets us. From the very beginning of the scripture, where is the spirit hovering in the darkness? He’s hovering over the chaos. The spirit is the most powerful in the chaos of life. And we’re so afraid to go back into that chaos because we know how bad it was there. But slowly we have to walk back into it and just say, “Jesus, tell me what was really happening here because I only have one view of it.” And so that’s the only way I know how to deal with it. But the beauty is that’s what our Savior did. He was traumatized and murdered, but he was never forsaken. And this goes all the way back to the question of death: Is God able to save us up out of death?
There are two questions you ask: “God, what do you want me to know and what do you want me to do?” Can you expand on that as we wrap this up?
When we were in this really tough situation in the Middle East, we were reading through Acts 4. And it says “the believers laid their requests before God.” They said to God, “You consider their threats.” Not “We’re going to figure out what to do with the threats.” This is always our mistake: We’re going to figure out how to cope with this. We’re going to figure out what to do with persecution.
And so we realized we needed to be asking God, “What do you want us to know about this situation?” Otherwise we’ll just come up with our own conclusion about what’s happening. And we don’t know everything. It’s so fascinating how God gives wisdom about things. And then once you have the fuller knowledge, then you ask him, “So what do I do? What do you want me to do as a result of this?” Otherwise I’m just going to react on my own. This is not a good idea. And then what you do is different, knowing what God knows in the situation versus what I know. It’s stunning how fast Christians will just do it based on what they know. Instead of asking God, “Do we have the whole understanding of what is happening here?” Otherwise I’m just going to react against these people. So that’s the power of those questions.
Even talking to my own kids growing up, they all have different identities. And when they would ask me something, I would just say, “God, what do you want me to know about this kid? You know him. I don’t know. I know him in a way. You know him. What do you want me to know about him? And then based on that as a parent, what do you want me to do?” And it was different for each kid. It wasn’t the same thing for all three of them. Give God the things and ask him to help you think through them. Obedience means “to hear and respond.” Then obey. Obedience is better than sacrifice. Then listen and respond to what he says so that you’re operating with as much wisdom as you can.
This just hit me and I hope I can do this without getting totally choked up. I just came back from visiting my dad; this is probably his last year. I had to have a “come to Jesus” talk with him. So I was going to go in and talk to him, and I said,” God, what do you want me to know?” And he shared some things with me. And then, “What do you want me to do?” And this is where I kind of had to laugh because of my evangelical upbringing. But I clearly heard, “I want you to do nothing. This is for you.” And that was so profound to me. We go about thinking that, “If I know, then it’s my job to do something.” And sometimes we walk into situations where God’s going, “No, this is actually, I’m not requiring anything for you other than to submit to me. Listen to me.” And then you’re going to be surprised. And I’m telling you, it was an amazing encounter. I’m 58 years old. Yesterday was the first time my dad said he loved me and it was beautiful.
Jesus knew what to say. He knew when to stop talking and he knew when to leave. We never know this. We always stay too long. Say too much. We think everything in my life depends on us versus No, you don’t need to do anything. You submit to the one who knows all and trust what he says.
The number one exhortation in scripture is “Don’t be afraid.” It’s the most often said, and we never deal with it. We don’t talk about it. And just giving people a place to say what they’re afraid of. We didn’t counsel them. We just say it out loud. When you say it out loud, it gets a little bit smaller.
Listener Question
If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?
I subscribe to a lot of travel Instagram pages or they are just in my algorithm. Last night I got one for Bali, and Bali has been on my top three list for as long as I can remember. So it reignited my Bali adventure that I want to have.
I really want to go back to Israel and I would like to do it when it’s safe, but honestly, my top destination includes who I’d be with. I want to go to Israel with Kristi McLelland. I’ve done Israel twice, but when I was younger, and I know so much more than I did. I think it would have a whole different gravity to me. And to have the context that she provides would be incredible.
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